How About No?

I find that if you want it bad enough, anything can be compared to The Hunger Games. Like people blaming they're every problem on bullying, it's a hasty generalization (an unoriginal one at that): a way for people to feel like they're thinking outside the box and being special or different.

How about no?

Call me a hipster, or someone who simply wants to criticize, but the title of Why the Olympics Are a Lot Like 'The Hunger Games' bored me. Unfairness, exploitation and the flaws of society, are so much more than themes of the popular bluckbuster and New York Times Bestseller. Am I unaware of the fact that it's the first creation ever to have these subjects as themes? The first to point them out metaphorically or directly?

How. About. No?

With the Olympics raging right now, I think about how it's pretty obvious the mechanism and system that stands in charge behind the curtains. I guess it's mean to criticize an 11 year old for not knowing exactly what she was getting into, but did Retrosi figure it out only when she saw or read The Hunger Games? Is that really what it took? A dystopian novel of the 21st century?

Wow.

I've come to learn that the world revolves around money and those who have it. This to me is the most basic definiton of capitalism. If I were a grade school teacher, I'd explain it like that, not going into detail of course, because I'd probably get called out for it by angry parents.

Call me a communist, but like everything, capitalism has its good side and its bad side, and I don't think they cancel out. The bad always weighs more than the good for me.

Now you can go ahead and call me a cynic.

I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but I thinks it's safe to say that Retrosi is. She has lived most of her life under the regime of sponsporship and its peer pressure, and all of its consequences. Being an Olympic aspiring athlete seems to entail the ultimate form of peer pressure, where insecurity is instilled for manipulation to flow freely and undisturbed. Through it, you become an animal with a single ability that can be milked incessantly to fatten others with millions (of dollars, not calories from dairy products).

But isn't this how the world works? Whatever it is that you do, it's only viable if it produces profit, be it for you or for someone else. Why? Becasue the dairy products you need to survive aren't for free, are you crazy? Whether it's fair or unethical is also irrelevant. You really think that because you have an ability that makes you worthy of a gold medal in the Olympics, that you get to escape the ways of the world?

News flash: athletes, tycoons, hobos... everyone, is part of the world.  Because "we are the people who rule the world" and therefore we are the world. We make the rules and we follow and break them. We fight them and live by them. We are to blame for the exploitation, the unfairness, the flaws of society.

Don't wait for a book to realize it.